I don't understand how they managed to raise $73.5 million fucking dollars for this; apparently I need an introduction some of these venture capital people...

It's impossible to predict who is and isn't going to make it so even losers still sometimes manage to get cash. It's just a wild guess by the VC people that maybe they'll make it. I very vaguely remember back in the internet boom of the 1990s that USA Today profiled a handful of start up companies over a long period. The only company I remember, and I don't remember their name at all, was some company that had this crazy idea of (if I remember correctly) doing something like representing websites by planets on your desktop. So if you clicked on Mars, for example, you might go to Amazon.com. They not only got funding for this, even for the times, crazy idea, they got Patrick Stewart, Capt. Picard himself, to act as their paid celebrity spokesperson. Even with a smaller web at the time as an IT professional I remember questioning the need for this kind of thing, but 2 or 3 graduates of some expensive East Coast university's business school got the idea and VC people gave them enough money to get them off the ground and hire employees and pay Patrick Stewart.

As another example of who can predict, look at Twitter. It can't turn a profit and you can make a strong case that not only is it completely useless it's actually harmful to society, yet it somehow remains in operation and people buy the stock for it.

But the jobs; the hopes for even more jobs; the defunding of the Saudi religious nuts and the good will (in the US flyover states) may very well hurt the Democrats for quite a while. If labor joins the Republicans because the Democrats have deserted them then... the balance of power will have been changed.

Organized labor isn't going to join the Republican Party. The Republicans will treat them just like they do the minorities - if your personal political philosophy makes you align with the Republicans then they will welcome your vote, but they're not going to push for anything that most people in those groups want. Republicans are very much anti-union and probably always will be. Organized labor is stuck with the Democrats and the Democrats did not abandon them but do note that a rather large number of Americans are not union members and have a pretty negative view of unions for a large variety of reasons. Many Americans see organized labor as self-serving to the point of borderline insanity.

Here's one example. I don't know anything about this seller but I bought this exact tool some time ago on Woot.com. You can find somewhat similar tools on Amazon and other websites under the name "life hammer" or "safety hammer". http://www.dhgate.com/product/...|3634601311

Radical Islam can't be a factor here. It's all due to climate change. The fact that your country doesn't have a very good handle on it's own radical insurgents doesn't mean you're looking for convenient scapegoats to deflect blame to. Naw.

A few years ago I went through TSA with my laptop. Naturally they wanted to search it. No problem. I thought.

I travel about once a year for personal reasons in the USA by plane, sometimes a little more. I've traveled overseas a bit too. I've had TSA people subject me to special screening. I once had US Customs decide I just had to be a smuggler after returning from a tourist trip to China because the agent at the airport decided that there was just zero chance I would go there as a tourist. I didn't care about getting "special treatment" so I went over to the special area so a different agent could go through my luggage and all he found was a teapot and a few Chinese souvenirs. He was really pissed off at the agent who flagged me because I was just a waste of his time. I was greatly amused by that. I've had some interesting encounters with customs in Ukraine too, but I can speak Russian which helps and nothing was really too wild there with customs. But one thing that has never, ever happened to me is having anybody interested in looking at my laptop. If you're brown skinned then there's not much you can do about profiling, but if you aren't, maybe you need to think about how you present yourself or dress when traveling because you are definitely doing something that is screaming that you need to be examined.

Apparently the guy survived a 12 story drop... what makes you think that suicide nets aren't already implemented?

No mention of suicide nets. Plus, can you imagine the negative publicity Amazon would get from putting up suicide nets in the USA? It's a completely different story to do that in China as Apple did, but their factory had really weird rules for the employees and was not in any way a typical Chinese workplace. I don't know what the odds are for surviving a 12 story drop, but it's not impossible. The odds aren't good, but one unofficial source I found put a 15 story fall at a 1 in 100 chance of survival. There was a documented case where a flight attendant survived a fall of about 20,000 without a parachute from an airplane, although I don't know the details of that.

TFS and TFA both utterly fail to identify or even mention one of the largest issues with mobile devices today.

Security.

Forget flying to the red planet to bridge the gap for survival. I could print the number of times we've read the words "root access" regarding mobile device hacking in 2016 and have enough material to build an actual bridge to Mars.

Totally agree with you. I've read so much stuff over the years about phone hacks that I am super paranoid about doing anything over my phone that involves me accessing a site I actually do care about having a secure connection to, such as my bank, credit card providers, etc. I control my main PC at home and keep the anti-virus updated and don't go to websites that I shouldn't be visiting if I care about security. I have a lot of confidence that I can connect safely and securely from that PC to wherever I need to go. I don't have that kind of confidence on my phone. Plus I'm not 12 years old so I actually do prefer the bigger screen on a PC and the easier ability to open multiple windows there for comparison if needed.

Power gone for half the time and armed guards? Power is not an issue in the cities, and armed guards? even the cops here don't carry arms. only the ones in our movies do.

I can only say that my Fortune 500 company has a large number of Indian workers in some major Indian IT city I'm too lazy to look up and they do lose power quite often or their network goes down for some random reason or the people managing their network screw it up. I've read on the BBC that people from India do complain about power outages all the time. Maybe you're just fortunate wherever you are. But yeah, I think the armed guards thing is pure exaggeration. I've never heard of that one at all.

It's the various academicians that still can't believe Trump won because, "nobody I know voted for Trump".

Put me in that corner. I accept the election result, but I'm baffled where all the Trump supporters came from. Most of my friends are die-hard Republicans, but I don't know a single person who (admitted) voting for Trump. I suspect that's because this election wasn't really fought along typical Republican vs Democrat, leftie vs rightie lines.

I can only tell you that I live in what is called a "red state" and I know plenty of people, including college educated, who voted for Trump. In fact every person I know who supports the Republican Party not only voted for Trump without even the slightest worry, a small number of them begged me to vote for him too.

"That $100 dollar brand new iPhone that I bought at the night market/store that sells electronics for a fraction of their cost stopped working. But I know it must be legit despite the low cost because the guy who sold it to me told me it was legit. Funny, neither he nor the store are there any more. What's wrong with your crap products, Apple?"

I've been to China. It's definitely that. Keep in mind that this is also a country where most of its citizens believe that you can't lose money on the stock market no matter what stock you buy - ever.

Actually, it's a lot more complicated than that. I'd say that most Democrats in Congress were against the TPP and most Republicans were quietly for it. Democrats opposed it because unions hate it and the Democratic Party relies on unions for votes. Most Republicans actually favored it because in theory the Republican Party supports all free trade deals. But then you got into the Republicans being the party of "No" which meant that they had to oppose Obama on one hand yet actually approving of what he did on the other. Had a Republican been president and submitted the deal as written to Congress, it would probably already be passed. Being the party of "No" caused them to stall for time and in the end they realized that a significant number of voters are upset about job losses and voting for a deal likely to lead to more job losses simply wasn't going to work.

This vote and the calls for protectionism in the USA and UK strike me as odd. Back in my day... it was the Conservatives and Republicans and similar parties defending trickle-down, supply-side, trade leads to growth, which leads to prosperity for everyone.

You remember correctly. But that was in the 1980s and things have changed. The Republicans began strongly embracing what I call "stupid people" in the past decade. I blame Karl Rove for this. I think it started roughly around 2004. You know how people too stupid to vote correctly in Florida all voted for Al Gore in 2000? They got flipped to the Republican side. This culminated in the queen of anti-intellectualism, Sarah Palin, running for vice-president in 2008.

Now there's support for reducing freedom of movement in the UK (and other places in Europe), and for the USA to erect trade barriers. All this time, the official explanation was that international trade was not a zero-sum game, that if there's more trade, everyone eventually gains and that protectionism was BAD. I can't remember if state investment on infrastructure was even worse than protectionism, but in any case it was something that Chicago school/Republican politicians just would not have.

I don't live in the UK so I'll let others comment on that, but as people without college degrees (not necessarily stupid though) and stupid people began to embrace the Republican Party, Sarah Palin pushed an anti-intellectual agenda that resonated big time with small town, non-college educated America. Palin has said multiple times that the only "real" America is the small town one, which just happens to be where a lot of people didn't go to college. If you can see a map of how the vote was broken out by county in the recent presidential election, you'll see that at least 90% of the US is red with the only blue areas being in bigger cities. As small town people have embraced the Republican Party, they've continued to lose jobs in manufacturing and the small towns where they live don't offer adequate replacement jobs. So this has led to a somewhat large group of people in small town America who see themselves and their small town life under siege. They're very receptive to being told that they are victims of forces beyond their control and only the Republicans can bring back those small town jobs that went away. They also tend to be very religious which brings them into conflict with societal changes like gay marriage where they see these changes as coming out of big cities and being pushed by Democratic Party elites who actively wish to bring harm to them.

Not only do they not care, they haven't for years now on Facebook. I grew up in rural area in a red state. The people I went to high school with and are friends with on Facebook are pretty strong Republican Party supporters. They truly don't care about the truth of any story they share any more. For those of you who don't know, one of the ways that right wing lies get spread on Facebook is that they got people convinced that Snopes is in fact dishonest and pushing a liberal agenda and you can't trust if for anything. I've seen people I know argue this when someone points them to Snopes to rebut some nonsense they are sharing. These people are in turn now convinced that you can't verify anything any more because anything that disagrees with what you agree with is a lie itself. They don't even question what they are sharing either, which is a real shame. I have to admit to really losing a lot of respect for some of my old school friends who I know are smart enough to think critically about what they are reading, but they don't care any more to do so.

I live and grew up in a red state. Because of my background a significant number of my friends on Facebook are die hard Republicans. A small number of those spend way too much time worrying about politics and sharing fake news items and various anti-Democratic Party stories. Some of what I've seen is actually offensive. But is anybody actually convinced to change their minds because of this? All I see is other die hard Republicans comment about how true this stuff is. A rather large part of the US voting population is party locked and they are just not ever going to vote for the other party no matter what. Does it really matter if these stories are lies if all they do is preach to the already converted? Studies have shown that people deliberately seek out sources of information to reinforce already decided opinions and that if you confront people who hold a false belief with real proof that their belief is false, they will actually double down on the false belief and get even more adamant that it can't be wrong.